Chelsea Clinton: Anger can inspire

A good first step for young people looking to change the world, says Chelsea Clinton, is to consider, “What makes you most angry? What pisses you off?”

Clinton, the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, dished out that blunt advice Wednesday at a conference on women and technology in Newport Beach, California.

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The 34-year-old spent substantial parts of her appearance discussing challenges facing women and girls who want to break into the tech field.

She also said that one of the things that makes her angry — and therefore motivated — is that the world has yet to live up to the standards for advancing women as outlined in the platform from the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. It was there that her mother, now a leading potential 2016 presidential contender, famously declared, “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.”

“For me, the thing that makes me angry is, no country in the world has lived up to the promise of the Beijing platform,” Clinton said at the event, hosted by the National Center for Women and Technology Information.

At the Clinton Foundation, an initiative called No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project is partnering with a number of organizations to determine how much progress has been made since Beijing, Clinton noted.

That effort is giving Clinton a productive outlet for that anger, she said.

“Think about what your talents and skills are,” she told the audience, “And match [them] with what makes you angry — or, if you’re differently constituted, to what makes you most happy and inspired.”

Hillary Clinton has made women’s rights a theme of dozens of speeches she has given around the country in recent months. She’s likely to delve into it in greater detail next month as she sets off on a tour to promote her upcoming memoir about her time at the State Department. The book, titled “Hard Choices,” is due out June 10.